Opinion: Vancouver’s Chinatown and redrawing the lines in the 'City of Optimists'

In the reverberations following the 105 Keefer St. rezoning rejection, the hearings lay bare the painful realities of city life in Vancouver. Amongst the gleaming towers and $6 lattes, life for many Vancouverites is increasingly vicious, indifferent and cruel. The public hearing became a sign of the growing frustrations and shortcomings of civic governance.

However, 105 Keefer offers lessons from which a person could even develop a sense of optimism.

What can be learned?

The overwhelming opposition to 105 Keefer grew out of a civic demand for the right development. In various correspondences, 3,634 citizens opposed and 1,843 supported the project. During four hearings, 150 citizens came to speak against and 46 in favour of the rezoning — the largest turnout of speakers for such a hearing in recent memory.

Social context matters. Vancouver has a storied Urban Design Panel process that shapes what gets built in this city. The panel is a jury-like collection of architectural and design professional volunteers who evaluate major building projects, rezonings and planning initiatives. It only considers building design and its physical components and interrelationships to its immediate surroundings. A building’s positive and negative impact on the social, economic, and cultural fabric of a neighbourhood is rarely considered.

Assessing the building’s community impact beyond its site should be part of an expanded Urban Design Panel mandate and an extension of the practice of environmental impact reviews. If not the panel, then existing advisory bodies like the planning commission or a new one should assess the social and economic impact of a project to its surrounding community. A development’s possible social and economic effects on a neighbourhood should be a criterion of assessing its fit to the design of the community if only, at the very least, in the name of transparency and informed decision making. Not every project that can be built should be built.

The Keefer Street proposal became a microcosm of Vancouver’s deficiencies in deep inclusion and engagement. The city is in dire need of a comprehensive housing strategy for a diverse seniors population. Its current “housing reset” is intended to “improve affordability over the next 10 years,” but omits anyone over the age of 64. This oversight seems to ignore a growing population segment whose golden years are haunted by shadows of housing insecurity and social isolation.

The proposal of one floor of seniors social housing for three floors of luxury penthouses was an act of tokenism and not a comprehensive strategy to house low-income seniors. The chaos and inadequacies in language translation during the first days of the hearings rebuts the image of Vancouver as an engaged city for all.

The most optimistic lesson to be learned is that Vancouver can change. The opposition to the project crossed a multitude of historic cultural, ethnic, generational and income lines. Boundaries that once neatly and conveniently confined and defined the city, did not work. The admonishment decried by some councillors on the unruly behaviour of some opponents attempted to draw trite lines of containment and division. This type of political grandstanding does not heal the pain created by this rezoning and has provoked an open letter countering these claims. Watching new and old generations of Vancouverites from all walks of life rise up together was inspirational and thrilling.

In 1913, Thomas Mawson, in the very first urban plans for Vancouver, called the growing mill town a “City of Optimists.” In 2017, the housing affordability crisis and tepid growth for local incomes, fentanyl crisis, 10-year tent city and the Balmoral Hotel show how Vancouver’s urban fabric is fraying for many of its residents.

The city yearns for leadership that transcends social, economic, cultural and political lines and possesses a civic imagination that goes beyond the urban status quo. The art of the deal needs to be countermanded by the art of building and cherishing existing communities. If this council cannot offer this leadership, there are several hundred Vancouverites who opposed 105 Keefer and showed that they could. They would make fine elected leaders for Vancouver.

Andy Yan is a registered professional urban planner and an adjunct professor of urban planning at the University of B.C.’s School of Community and Regional Planning and of urban studies at Simon Fraser University.

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